“So they turned their attention to the other organs they could not replace by mechanical means, such as ovaries. No mechanical device can create eggs, it requires a biological device. They took the research they had done on aging, and while that research never lead to the discovery of reversing age, it did lead to the discovery of accelerating age. With the ability to accelerate age they could clone a person, grow them to puberty in a matter of weeks, and then harvest the parts they wanted, and discard the body.”
“Oh my GOD! That’s disgusting!” Just hearing something like that made Jack sick. To create a human being just to harvest the parts! “How could anyone do that and live with themselves? It’s unthinkable!”
Teague grimly nodded in agreement. “I agree with you, but you have to understand, these people did not have the same moral ideas that you and I have. They were raised in an environment where the value of human life was measured by its contribution to society.” He stopped pacing, went to a cabinet, took out a cup, and filled it from a pitcher he got from the refrigerator. “Would you like some water?” Jack nodded and he poured a second cup. Putting the two cups on the table, he sat down and took a sip. “In the EoS, a ten year old child would not hesitate to put a gun to his father’s head and pull the trigger if the man could no longer work. These were a people raised in an environment completely alien to the world you grew up in, Jack. It wasn’t that people were cruel to each other, they were just raised to believe that contribution is sacred, not life.” He took another sip to let this sink in.
“But wouldn’t a child have love for a parent? That alone should prevent someone from killing a loved one.”
“That is a good point, and you are correct. Even a lack of religious morals doesn’t prevent people from caring about one another. But it is that caring that leads to the willingness to sever a connection even as deep as the one between a father and his child. You see, this is a culture built on contribution. A child is taught from the beginning that life is only as valuable as the contribution it can provide. A man might be able to work hard enough to provide for himself and his family, and a ten year old child might be able to work hard enough to contribute his own share. But that ten year old could not provide for himself and his father, let alone the rest of the family. Perhaps though, a ten year old could provide for his siblings, and they still had potential to contribute and provide for themselves, where the father who was unable to contribute was simply dead weight at this point. What use is love if it doesn’t lead to sacrifice for those you love? A loving father would not only insist that his child do what is best for the family, but teach him from a young age that it is the right choice. Hence it was practically an honor to end the life of a crippled or elderly parent.”
This was so foreign to Jack that he wasn’t sure he would ever understand it. So he just nodded and said, “So there was no religion or morality to prevent someone from suggesting that it was bad to grow a human being solely to kill it and harvest the parts, because it served the highest purpose they believed in: contribution to society.”
“More or less, Jack. You are very quick to understand.” Jack again simply nodded. “But there was more to it than just what they could get out of the harvesting.
“See, the bodies they grew had been alive for four to eight weeks. Their brains were growing but there was no input to make them develop. Humans have very few native instincts and rely on the parents to teach them how to survive, and that takes years. Nobody was willing to sacrifice time and resources to “raise” a full grown human body that consumed as much as an adult. It could take years before it could contribute on its own, and the sacrifice was too much, at least when you look at it in raw terms of contribution versus consumption.”
“Without the morality that religion brings, people looked at it in the simplest of views. A human body that cannot think on its own and survive without the aid of others is simply not human, it is just a mass of biological organs, an animal that can provide something for humans.”
Jack had to take a drink of water just to keep from vomiting. “This is making me ill, Doc. What about a newborn baby? A baby can’t survive on its own, what is the difference?”
“Don’t forget that at the core, we are biologically programmed to procreate and care for our offspring. Nobody gave birth to these bodies. And if you looked at it from the purely mathematical perspective, a baby does not require many resources to raise, at least compared to what a full grown person requires, and while it requires sacrifice to raise a child, it is a worthy investment that will return far more than the sacrifice.”
Jack understood this part, but it still left a nauseating feeling in his gut. “Do they still do this?”
“Oh no, the EoS no longer exists. It was ironic, but the policies that they put in place to become so successful were their ultimate downfall. Regardless of the medical advances, the original founders of the EoS realized that they would soon be unable to contribute to society themselves, and be turned away from the very cities they built. They had to come up with a way to change a lot of people’s minds in a hurry if they were going to remain in power.
Teague paused here, almost as if remembering the events himself but perhaps as if this was a turning point of some kind and needed a dramatic pause. “The history they had learned from the spoils of the technology hunters showed them that the fastest way to change a culture was with religion. The tool they chose was Christianity.”
Jack frowned. “You say that like it is a bad thing.”
“Jack, don’t get me wrong, but if you look at history you will see that some of the worst atrocities were done in the name of God. Religion is a powerful force.”
“I don’t disagree with that, but religion can also prevent a lot of atrocities. The world you have described is sickening to me, truly a Hell on earth. Surely if people hadn’t given up their faith things would have turned out different.”
“Perhaps, but to use a phrase you might be familiar with, that is neither here nor there. Things happened the way they did.”
“Okay, go on.” He wasn’t happy with this, but it made sense.
Teague moved on quickly, “First, they brought forth a new discovery. They declared that their inability to create life from nothing was irrefutable proof that there was a God, a being that created life on earth, and then created man. They used scripture from the bible to convince people that the Great War that decimated humanity was in fact the Armageddon. The End Times had come and gone, and all the people who deserved to spend eternity in Heaven were taken and the rest left to rot on earth until they perish and spend eternity rotting in Hell. They taught that they were all the descendants of these damned, and they themselves were damned to an eternity in Hell as well. But then they offered redemption, a way to cleanse their tainted souls and gain a shot at getting into Heaven. All they had to do was follow the rules set forth by God, given unto them, the scientists, to spread to the forsaken. They wrote their own book of the bible, a new age warranted new rules.
“The general population had not been raised with religious morals, but after a couple dozen years of living in the prosperity and comfort of the cities, the idea of having an all-powerful God to watch over them and protect them and give them eternal life was appealing. Nobody wanted to go back to the way it was before the EoS came along. The most appealing aspect of religion, however, was that God had created life, and therefore only God had the right to end life. This meant society could not turn people out when they were no longer able to contribute to society. Contribution was written into the new book of the Holy Bible as an unbreakable rule, but once you were no longer able to contribute, you could retire to enjoy the fruits of your labor. The popularity of this concept grew very rapidly.
“Again, however, the creators of the EoS had stepped on their own foot. The power shifted from the people who controlled the technology to the people who controlled the church. At first these were the same people, but the personalities best suited for scientific work were
not necessarily suited for religious leaders. Those previously in power formed and funded their own churches, each with slight variations, but in most cases they lost control of their creations when someone would come along who had the right personality to rally people to their beliefs. The more people who joined their church, the more power that church had. Lines were drawn, and tensions began to build. Each new church had more lenient rules and better rewards in heaven. The struggle for power eventually led to the same result most struggles end in: religious war. Only, this time the technology was much further advanced than in 2012. Within another decade, all that technology had been focused on eliminating each other from the face of the planet. The EoS lasted about forty years in total before they were completely destroyed.”
There was a minute or two of silence as this sunk in. All this information made sense, but it still didn’t explain how he came to be. “So the EoS died off, where does that leave me?” He took a drink of water and tried to relax.
“Oh, I’m sorry Jack, you had asked if the EoS was still around and... oh never mind, I just got side tracked. Okay, in a way, the most important discovery ever came from the formation of these churches within the EoS. Every so often, someone comes along that just looks at things in a different way than anyone else. There was one scientist, we know him as Christopher, who had quietly worked for years on studying the development of the human brain. His research focused on teaching computers to be creative. He figured that the key was in the way a person views things, or more simply put, his upbringing. To learn how various events in one’s life lead to being more or less creative, he studied how the brain stores memory. His goal was to give computers a history, or a set of memories, so they would develop goals for themselves rather than be slaves to the creativity of the person programming the computer. In the process, he figured out not only how the brain creates memories and personality, but also how to duplicate the cells that have memory stored in them, and cause those cells to develop in another brain. Unfortunately the only way to ‘read’ the memories was to destroy those cells, which would kill the person whose memories you were reading. Because of this he could only use freshly dead people in his experiments, or people who were about to die. In his first successful experiment, he took the memories from a person who had just died, and grew them into another person’s brain so that person now had the memories of the dead person. It was something of a success, and that person now had some memories from the one who was dead. However, the conflicting memories drove the person insane in a relatively short period of time.
“With the success and the knowledge that two personalities in one brain is a bad idea, Christopher wanted to take that technology and apply it to a brain that was a blank slate. The only blank brains he knew of were the clones that were being grown to replace people’s organs. They were perfect candidates, but if he grew a full set of memories into them, then they were no longer just meat, now they were people who could contribute to society, and of more value than just an organ. Keep in mind that wealth and power were gained from the contribution that your technology gave to the society, and the scientists who were making cloned body parts were enjoying a very high status in the EoS. Because of this, they did not allow Christopher to experiment with their cloned bodies for fear they would lose that status. His research on creating memories came to a halt and he started to look back to applying the memories to the thinking computers.
“Then along comes the religious folks, saying that God gave us the gift of life, and we need to treat human life as the most important thing on earth. In other words: no more making humans just for spare parts, even if they couldn’t think for themselves. The power shifted away from the scientists who cloned and the door was open for Christopher to grow a person and copy a brain from a freshly dead person into the newly growing brain.
“Again, Success! And again, a failure. The first time they did it, the person woke up, remembered that he was dying, and that triggered his body to die again. That was an issue.”
Teague paused and took a drink of water. “So he spent some time figuring out how to determine the new memories from the old memories. Once he got that down, he transplanted all but the last few days from a dead man’s brain into a new brain in one of the clones. Another success, and another failure. The successful part was that the clone didn’t have memory of dying, so he didn’t die right away. For all intents and purposes, he functioned normally. It took a few hours for his brain to reconnect with the rest of the body, something to do with the way the body was grown at such an accelerated pace, kind of how it takes a baby time to really see things, and to move and figure out how to use its body. Like the accelerated growth of his body, his brain learned quickly and soon the person was up and moving, even walking and talking.”
Jack understood that this was why it took him time to see and move the previous day. “You said it was another failure though. What happened?”
“It was quite simple, actually. The man’s memories did not match his body. They put his memories in someone else’s body. In the first experiments, Christopher was able to put some memories into someone else’s brain, but that person had already established his identity. His brain knew exactly how his heart worked, how all his organs worked, and most importantly, who he was physically. He didn’t die, he just went insane from the conflicting memories. In this latest experiment, he put an incompatible set of memories in a body, and within hours, the man’s heartbeat was irregular, his breathing was out of sync, his liver and kidneys started to fail, and eventually, he died. The subconscious memory was too unfamiliar with the body and it caused him to shut down. Like I said earlier, the mind is an incredible computer. It knew those things weren’t right and rejected them.”
Teague took a final drink of water, then got up and put the cup on the counter. He started pacing again as he finished the story. “So it was obvious at that point you had to put the memories into an exact clone to get it to work, and when he tried it, it worked! He cloned a freshly dead man, accelerated his growth, implanted the memories, and he had the first successful true clone of another human being.
“Christopher had done what nobody had ever been able to do, and he never would have been able to do it if it hadn’t been for the religious groups that outlawed the harvesting of the cloned bodies. In a manner of speaking, God had been the catalyst that led to the success.”
Jack looked at him in silence for a full minute, taking in the whole sequence of events that led up to the ability to re-create a human with all his memories, then finally asked a question. “So how come you said it’s the most important discovery ever?”
Teague stopped pacing, sat down across from Jack, looked him in the eye and said, “Quite simply because it will save humanity from extinction.”
Chapter 13
“Come on doc, isn’t that a little melodramatic? How is it that cloning will save humanity?” Jack was skeptical of the idea. Humans had been on earth for hundreds of thousands of years without the need to clone; he found it hard to believe that it was now that important. The story behind it all was logical enough that he could buy into it, and he was pretty much convinced that Teague was telling him the truth here. How else could he explain where he was? This would have to be the most elaborate hoax ever, if it were not true. There was only one thing he could think of that didn’t make sense. Teague was about to try to answer his question when Jack blurted out another question. “You said that Christopher had to use a freshly dead brain to clone, how is it that you used mine after three hundred and fifty years?” Jack leaned back, convinced that he had knocked a big hole in Teague’s story.
“That’s a good question, and it ties in with your first question.” Teague said it like he was proud to have gotten this far. “First let me go back to the EoS. I told you that they used their technology to try to wipe each other out. Well, they pretty much succeeded. One religious group in particular was sort of hell bent on wiping out humanity. They figured that God had meant for hu
manity to become extinct in the first big war that started in 2012. They genetically engineered a virus that took out the gene in male DNA that allows for reproduction. It was a time bomb virus that only affected male babies that were conceived by men and women who were exposed to the virus. So it took over fifteen years before anyone knew that it had happened, and by then there wasn’t a human on the planet that hadn’t been exposed to the virus. There was about a one in six thousand immunity rate, but it was so incredibly small that humanity didn’t stand a chance. The next generation was nearly the last to be born naturally. On top of this, all the biological warfare still going on was killing people by the thousands.”
“Are you saying that it wiped out everyone? Then what about you and the people here? Are you the last people on earth?” This had taken Jack by surprise. He hadn’t seen this one coming. He could deal with a world torn apart by nuclear fallout because even radiation had a half-life and eventually it would be gone, and humans could once again rebuild. But infertility, how do you overcome that?
“Remember when I told you that the EoS shared its knowledge?” Jack nodded. “Well, once Christopher was successful in a complete clone, he published his work and traded it for status and wealth. The power may have shifted away from the scientists, but this was a pretty big deal and while it didn’t give him much political status in the EoS, it afforded him better facilities to work in and a better lifestyle. By the time the information got to everyone, however, the power struggles had already begun, and most of the scientists were either creating new ways to kill people, or finding cures for the stuff the others were making. When the fighting was over, and only a handful of people were left in each city, it was clear that the only way to survive was to use that technology to clone each person as they died. I and a handful of people that live in this bunker are cloned descendants of those few survivors.”
The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) Page 9
